Apologies for the silence here, I agree this is important.
It intersects with Form design: grid of text or numeric input which is about doing data entry in a grid.
It also intersects with our work adding a formal concept of the entities that data collection is about.
It sounds like your goal to have a table that is at the beginning of a form that users can select one row of and then fill out the rest of the form about, is that right?